Sometimes the most beautiful things are just around the corner, and you don’t realise it. ‘Around the corner’ in this case means, the distance between The Netherlands and Austria. However it is nothing more than an 11-hour drive and therefore very within reach. After an invitation to come and drive two days on the Red Bull Ring in Styria, East Austria, I decided to do a stop-over on the way and enjoy the mountains a bit with a climb.
Objectives: hike over steep glacier terrain, and practise a bit climbing over rocky and icy terrain with fixed lines, wearing crampons. As it turns out, Hoher Dachstein was not far off the route towards the Red Bull Ring, and offered the terrain to fulfil both objectives. So with the Ferrari loaded on a tow truck, I set off to Austria where I was reminded of how beautiful the Alps truly are. I drove up curvy mountain road and parked the truck at the gondola. I don’t think there are many people who park their truck loaded with a race Ferrari at a ski resort in order to go climbing, but this is Mars to Everest in a Ferrari after all…
The first problem appeared. “Do you have a reservation for the gondola?”. I didn’t. I looked a few days before and all seats were available. For a Monday morning, there didn’t seem to be any reason to reserve. “All places are booked for today. Today won’t be possible to go up.”. My mood sank into my socks.. After a bit of begging and mentioning that I just drove 11 hours to be here, I did get a ticket to go up (and even without any wait), and soon after I arrived at the restaurant on top of the 2.7 km high glacier. This highest mountain of Styria presents itself with a legendary natural scenery and a panoramic view over the mountain peaks of Austria far to the Czech Republic and Slovenia; a great view!
There are two ways to climb the Hoher Dachstein from the restaurant: via the classical route over the glacier (‘Randkluftsteig’) or by climbing over the Eastern shoulder (‘Schulteransteig’). As I wanted to practise both rock climbing and steep glacier climbing I chose the classical route (the Schulteransteig eventually joins the Randkluftsteig and therefore ends up in the same summit push). The climb starts with an easy walk over the glacier to the Dachsteinwarte Lodge. From there, you have to leave the prepared path and hike up the glacier. I noticed I got a bit of a crowd watching me as I put on my harness, crampons etc to prepare for the glacier climb. ‘Are you going there up all by yourself?’ one person asked. ‘Ehm…yes I am’. ‘How long will it take you?’. ‘About an hour I think’.
I was wrong… the snow was deep. It’s early in the season and I could find only one foot trail. It matched exactly the proposed route that you can download from the Dachtsteiner website so I decided to follow it. However I was still creating my own footsteps and the snow was fairly deep. The glacier has several large crevasses close to the top and at least two traverses from one side to the other are necessary. It got steeper and steeper and I was enjoying not only the climb, but also the stunning views from this face, as well as the calmness of being there all by yourself. Plunging through the snow however made the ascent to the summit rock an hour already, and I still had to climb the summit rock.
There are fixed lines on the rock and climbing up I noticed one thing: my fear of heights was gone. This is strange as I was ascending a very steep rock and would normally be scared to death, but being fixed to the lines somehow gave me the confidence to remove the fear of heights. 75m below the summit though, the fixed lines were snowed under and it became impossible to belay. Being by myself, I chose safety and turned around, looking once more at the amazing views. I walked down and arrived back at the restaurant after a 3-hour and 45 min round tour. “You’re back already?”, asked a couple next to me, “we watched you going up”. A climb that felt slow apparently appeared fast to others.
I stuck to my tradition of drinking a Baileys after every summit (meaning no baileys today…) but the Austrian Wiener schnitzel for lunch was a delicious feast to celebrate a wonderful morning. I went down and entered the truck and with a happy feeling set course for the Red Bull Ring. More on that in the next blog!
Ciao!
Robin
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